Who is W.E.B. Du Bois from The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and what is their importance?

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is one of the most important black scholars and activists in American history. He was well-known as a civil rights activist, sociologist, author and a Pan-Africanist. He fought his entire life against racism, advocating any number of solutions to the problem. Du Bois was the first black to graduate from Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in History at was a professor of history and economics at Atlanta University. He was the leader of the NAACP in 1910 and founded their journal, The Crisis. He is also responsible for fighting to increase black political representation to achieve civil rights and to form a black intellectual elite that would fight an institutional war for African-American progress.